Kelner, 98, led Kent State shooting lawsuit

New York Times :
March 8, 2013
: Updated: March 16, 2013 7:08pm

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This Pulitzer Prize winning photo shows Mary Ann Vecchio, 14, screaming as she kneels over the body of student Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.

Joseph Kelner, a lawyer who took on the governor of Ohio, a former university president and the National Guard in a suit on behalf of the student victims of the Kent State shootings in 1970, died Monday in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 98.

Kelner took on a number of notable clients, including, for a time, Bernhard Goetz, the “subway vigilante,” who became a lightning rod in a national debate about crime, race and guns in December 1984 when he, a white man, shot four black teenagers who he claimed had tried to rob him in a subway car.

But even more significant was the Kent State case. On May 4, 1970, after a weekend of student rallies against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia — an ROTC building was set afire during the protests — National Guardsmen called to the campus by Gov. James Rhodes shot into the demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others.

An investigating commission found the shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable,” but public sentiment was with the Guard and with Rhodes.

Kelner was hired by the mother of Jeffrey Miller, a slain student who appeared in a widely reproduced photograph lying face down on the pavement with an anguished young woman kneeling over him. Kelner became chief counsel for the victims and their families in a civil suit that went to trial in 1975.

In federal court, a jury exonerated Rhodes; Robert White, who had been president of Kent State at the time; and 27 National Guardsmen.

Kelner, who had accused the judge, Don Young, of suppression of evidence and other errors, said afterward, “This is a sad day in American justice.”

The verdict was reversed on appeal, and Ohio officials offered a settlement of $675,000, which was accepted by the plaintiffs against Kelner's advice. He remained outraged by the shootings and the outcome of the case.

Joseph Kelner was born on June 12, 1914, in Des Moines, Iowa. He grew up mostly in Detroit, where his father, who died when Joseph was 10, and his mother ran a dry goods store. His family moved to New York, and he earned bachelor's and law degrees at New York University. He served in Army Counter Intelligence in World War II.

In the 1950s, Kelner started his own firm, which became Kelner & Kelner in the 1970s when his son Robert joined it.

Kelner's wife, the former Elizabeth Schneier, died in 2004. In addition to his son Robert, he is survived by another son, Kenneth, and two grandsons.